These days Carrie Underwood walks onto arena stages in gowns that sparkle under the lights. But her very first stage outfits came from somewhere much closer to home. Her mom made them.
Carrie grew up in Checotah, Oklahoma, a little town about an hour southwest of Tulsa. Her parents still live there today. Her dad, Stephen, who goes by Steve, worked at a paper mill. Her mom, Carole, taught elementary school for 25 years.
Carole helped get things started. She asked a friend who led the Checotah chamber of commerce to help get young Carrie spots in local talent shows.
And if Carrie was going to sing in front of people, she needed something to wear.
So Carole made it herself. Every single outfit.
“She would sew all of my outfits together,” Carrie said years later.
Carrie told the story in 2019 on SiriusXM’s The Highway, the satellite radio country channel, during a chat with host Jenny McCarthy. And one outfit stood out in her memory more than any other, because the whole thing started with a bargain.
“I remember we got a pair of boots at the Dollar Store for a dollar,” Carrie said.
A pair of one-dollar boots. That was the starting point.
For a schoolteacher raising a family in a small town, that was a smart buy. Where somebody else might have seen a cheap pair of boots, Carole saw the start of a show outfit.
From there, Carole got to work. “I remember she built this whole outfit, sparkles and sequins and all of this stuff,” Carrie recalled.
Any mom who has ever pulled together a costume the night before a school play knows that feeling.
Not every part of those early shows was fun, though. Little Carrie didn’t love those talent shows. Carole opened up about it in a TODAY segment called “Through Mom’s Eyes.”
“And you know, she hated it, because her friends were gonna be out there,” Carole said. “She didn’t like to sing in front of her friends.”
Stage nerves hit her hard back then. Carole remembered, “And sometimes it was like, she might be crying before she would get up there to sing, but she did it.”
Carole tells her side of those early years in this TODAY sit-down, and hearing a proud mom talk about her nervous little girl is the best part.
Carrie’s mom Carole looks back on the talent show years
Carole always believed in her daughter. “She just truly had a gift from God,” Carole said on TODAY.
That gift took Carrie a long way from Checotah. Still, she hasn’t forgotten where it started. She once took the TV show Extra back to her hometown, and you can see the place that raised her.
Carrie shows Extra around her Oklahoma hometown
The next time you see Carrie in a sparkly gown on a big stage, think about Carole back in Checotah, building sparkles and sequins around a pair of one-dollar boots for a nervous little girl who sang anyway.